good evening from new york, i'm chris hayes and not so long ago when the republican politicians were really on top of their game, they were masters at using the right wing media to do that bidding. it seemings to be the other way around. >> you know, one of the things that's so frustrating is you like your plan, you can keep your plan. >> what the president is saying about if you like your coverage, you can keep it, is not accurate. . >> they believed him, when they said 'peatedly if you like your plan you can keep it. >> all we have been hearing for the last three years is that if you like your policy you can keep it. try and sell that policy in the media, now the roles have been completely reversed. republican lawmakers now take

memorials should be open and cancer trials should be funded, they shouldn't have shut down the government in the first place and if they's now their position that people shouldn't have their health insurance plans cancelled, well then, they're a little late to the party. >> this is lee ioner, if they weren't able to weed you out in the application process, and somehow ended up paying for the operation, they send in lee, their hit man. his job is to get the company's money back any way he can. all he has to do is find one slipup on your application or preexisting condition you didn't know you had. >> we're going to go of this like it's a murder case. and i mean the whole unit dedicated to going through your health history for the last five years, looking for anything that would indicate that you concealed something, you

misrepresented something. so that they can cancel the policy. >> when robin baiten isn't selling antiques, she's fighting a battle on two fronts, one against breast cancer, and the other against her insurance company, just three days before she was scheduled to undergo a double mastectomy last year, she got this letter from blue cross blue shield of texas. i'm sure that robin would have loved your keep that you are health plan act in 2009, but alas, republicans weren't offering it back then. joining me now is norm ormstein. it has always been the case that legislators try to creates votes on issues, particularly for the opposing party that are going to be uncomfortable. but the entirety of the letting

tiff agenda particularly right now is simply legislating via press release. >> absolutely, what was also the case, chris, is, before you put a bill out there, you would at least hold a couple of hearings on it to see what the consequences, intended and unintended, might be. but this is clearly a press release bill, and if you want to look at whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, all you need to know is the club endorsed it. this is not an attempt to find a constructive way to make sure that people can keep their health insurance and that we aren't going to screw up the entire insurance process by raising rates on folks along the way. that is just a talking point. >> one of the dangers of this kind of legislating is that sometimes these things actually become law, one of the best examples of this is the chuck grassley amendment, grassley came up with an idea, it was going to be a move in which

members of congress and their staffs would have to go into exchanges, and he thought, aha, they'll vote against it. and members of congress said, okay, fine we'll go on the exchanges. and now congress has the status that was totally different than any employer in the country. and there were real consequences. there are consequences to legislating based on what you think will score you a debate point. >> and in this case, what fred upton has done with this bill, is not to order that insurance companies reinstate all of these plans, but to give them the option of doing it. it makes it even worse, because the plans that the insurers will bring back is the ones insuring the healthiest people and leave the others who will going to go on the exchanges which is going to raise the costs of the exchanges, just like the grassley amendment, you'll have a number of democrats who are

hearing from constituents and this is something that the president should not have said what he said repeatedly, it's blowing up in his face, it's going to pass the house and it's going to be a question of whether harry reid can keep something that is not a good idea right now from being enacted into law. >> we got word that senator andrews is going one step farther, actually mandate that insurance companies can't cancel plans. is other thing about this that i think is key, and norm, i want to have you on to talk about this from a historical perspective. i don't think appreciate the difference between the gingrich congress and the boehner congress. the gingrich congress, say what you will about it, it had a proactive legislative agenda. they actually passed a bunch of stuff that clinton signed.

this congress is barely working. they're barely coming to work, and when they are, there is nothing that john boehner is actually trying to pass. all he's trying to do is stop stuff from passing. >> and if you look at the important policy issues and areas out there that need resolution, and the fact that the house has scheduled 13 more days and not full days for the rest of the year, and it's basically thrown it in, we're going to do nothing else except find a way to keep the government operating. that tells you as well that we have a great difference here. >> the house has scheduled 13 days? >> for the rest of the year. they have pretty much said, we're done, we're not going to do anything else for the rest of the year. >> it is november 12th, we'll be working far, far more than 13 days, as will the vast majority of hard working americans across this great land. >> and they'll be working at least eight hours a day and that's not what we're going to see with congress in session. this is just not a good thing.

but of course if you look at all the votes we have seen in the house on the affordable care act, this is actually the first time you have seen something that's trying to amend it and not just to end it. but it's an amend in order to end it. >> for john boehner, half of life is making sure you don't show up. joining me now, obick roy, author of, quote, how medicaid fails the poor. i wanted to have you on because you wrote a piece for "the huffington post" about debate after the debate we're having about plan cancellations, and you said there's a lot les here than it appears. what do you mean by that? >> you try to put some meaning into this, okay, president obama said you can keep your plan. what do you think he meant? did he mean that insurers could not drop plans? i don't think people could have thought that, because it makes

no sense. he also said you could keep your doctor, does that mean he's going to keep doctors from retiring or dying? presumably what he meant that the affordable care act would not directly cancel plans that were in effect. and it doesn't cancel plans that are in effect. it grandfathers all the plans that were in effect at the time the bill was passed. a lot of people running around, saying oh, my god, plans are being cancelled. okay, well, plans that were put in place after the aca was passed, the fact checker pointed out. the vast majority of these plans were just issued in the last year. so didn't the insurance companies tell them when they -- i just didn't see much of a story here. >> that question strikes me as a pretty fair one. you're humana, you're selling a policy to someone in early 2013, you know there's a whole

regulatory frame work working its way through, and you have informed people talking to the people in hhs about what those plans are going to be. if you have a plan that might not meet the obama care requirements, shouldn't you have said, hey, just so you know, this may not be around next year? >> i think there was awareness among everyone who follow this is very closely, what was going to happen in 2014. but i think the afternoon person took president obama's promise to mean a plan that was in effect for those regulations kicked in on january 1, 2014, that i would be able to keep my plan, and my physician network as is. >> that is an answer to a different question. i think you're right about why people are angry, the question is, should the insurer, who's selling you a plan, they know the provision of which is contingent upon a regulatory process, they are following very closely, shouldn't they tell

you, hey, buddy check it out, we're going to sell you this, but we're going to be there. >> we should mandate that every american read my blog. i think the more important thing is, look, i think if people's plans were being cancelled and they were being replaced by aca plans that were truly better and truly more affordable, i think this wouldn't be the issue. for a lot of the people, the middle class and the upper middle class people who are going to have higher premiums, they didn't think they were free loading on the old system. they didn't think they were getting a free ride, they thought their health insurance were getting pretty expensive. >> and we should be clear, we just don't know what the numbers are on that. but your point, dean, there's no way the president could have promised you could keep your doctor.

but any health reform worthy of the name that would have kept every one of the health insurance plans existing in american when it was passed stay in effect? >> you literally have to have president obama nationalize the insurance industry. a and i know a lot of republicans have accused him of that, but the reality is, he's not done that. so what that means is, insurance companies drop plans, we have had our plans dropped, nothing to do with obama care, this happened years ago, before it was even legislation. insurance companies changed plans all the time. i don't know what someone could have thought if president obama was guaranteeing them their plan would stay in effect in perpetuity. he couldn't do that unless he took over the market. >> one point i'll make in the president's defense is this, any conservative reform of the health care system would also result in changes in the health

insurance market. and republicans in being so vigorous in defending the status quo pre-aca, that if they -- >> one of the biggest ones, white and bennett that got a tremendous amount of traction in the right wonk circles, which i think is about four people, that would have gotten rid of the deferred tax treatment that employer based health care has right now. that would be a huge change. you want to see some nightly news packages about that happening, you would see them, right? >> the cadillac tax in the aca does that, so any conservative forum that happenings now post-aca probably wouldn't be as disruptive on that specific point. but it would be disruptive in a lot of other areas. thank you both. coming up, we all went to our own cars and got out our self-defense tools or firearms or whatever you want to call them.

so we strapped on and a couple of people wanted to take pictures of us right away. >> that was from our interview earlier today with one of the men from this group, well for the first time anywhere, we'll get a response from one of the four moms who was at a private meeting talking about gun safety over lunch when those armed protesters showed up, ahead.

i know you never want to miss a show, and to be perfectly clear, you should never, ever miss a show, ever. but if you ever do miss a show, there are now some very appealing options for you, starting today you can watch "all in with chris hayes" on your iphone. it's a pretty excellent feature. back to never missing a show, and i'm being totally serious now, you actually never have to miss a show, because the new msnbc app allows you to watch any show live. you want to go and download the msnbc app for your ios device now.

i hear all this, you know, well this is class warfare, whatever, no, there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. nobody. you built a factory out there, good for you. but i want to be clear, you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. >> there's a reason why liberals love elizabeth warren, i count myself among them. it's moments just like that one you just saw and moments like this from her very first senate year. >> tell me a little bit about the last few times you have taken the biggest financial institutions on wall street all the way to a trial? anybody?

>> elizabeth warren is by no means -- what distinguishes her at this moment, is she has gone on this remarkable journey from being an outsider, to a yoouls senator who still talks like someone on the outside. she is willing to state the obvious truth that all of us know, but you almost never hear from the people in positions of power, that the system is rigged. >> today, the four biggest banks are 30% larger than they were just five years ago. and five largest banks hold more than half of all the total bank assets in the country. who would have thought five years after the crisis that we witnessed firsthand, the dangers of an overly concentrated financial system, that the too big to fail problem would only

have gotten worse. >> that was warren giving a major speech today. the continues battle over wall street regulation is the policy area i think where the division between the establishment wing of the party and the raw anger of the liberal grass roots is at its most intense. there are people inside the democratic party, many of them in power who think the system can be managed. and there are people inside the democratic party who know that it is broken in some fundamental way. elizabeth warren is one of those people. and the biggest question that faces her party is whether to adopt warren's populous message as a governing philosophy, or perhaps more acutely. alexis, this is my feeling about elizabeth warren. you start talking about elizabeth warren and hillary

clinton in 2016. that doesn't interest me that much. if you look through the polling, issue after issue, democrats on economic issues of inequality, power of finance, percentage of democrats dissatisfied with the size and inflation of the the major corporations. you look through your issue of the day and you think, oh, financial reform. this is going to be a little bit when it comes to financial

health reform. >> we should note that there are other senators that are very out front on this issue. the other big shipping that is fascinating about the war in speech and as far as a figure is that if you produce cable news and if you look through the issues and you think, financial firm, okay, this will be in little bit of a tough haul. we're going to push this rock uphill. and here's warren who's going out and getting two million youtube views in a speech on financial reform. she's tapping into the fact that no one has really spoken to the resentment and frustration that

americans have of what happened five years ago. they have both have lots of views on youtube for their comments. they get lots of small donations to finance their campaign so there's a real gap here. and there is an open for republicans and some republicans are starting to take that seriously. you have people like david vitter who i disagree with vehemently on most issues, but he has worked with sherry brown on some very important pro reform things like raising capital requirements, which is basically saying that things can't operate on so much borrowed money. >> in the world of regulatory news, today was actually a big, important day, because the

president named a new chair for the commodities trading commission, which is just a jumble of letters, but basically is the relatively small entities that stands between us and the precipice, i mean really, if there's one regulator who's going to keep us from plunging into something as horrifying, destructive and terrible as what we went through, this is that body. >> that's right and i think we have a real danger here, because we have gary ginsler and i like to liken him as the superman of the financial reform. and all we're going to be left with at the cftc is like aqua man, gary ginsler is the savor of kittens, he came from wall street, but he has used that knowledge for good. >> i wrote a column in the --

this golden sack stooge, what the heck, he's retreds from wall street. the guy has been incredible, he's been the best regulator we have had. i was completely wrong. i'm sorry gary ginsler. coming up next -- >> the flyers said he was endorsed by ron wilson. no not the former state representative. the fine print said ron wilson is dave wilson's cousin. >> that's correct, we are. >> did they really endorse you? >> yes, i called him up and i said bloomfield, iowa. >> funny thing is that's not even close to the worst thing that that guy did to get elected.

did you hear the one about the white guy in texas who pretended to be black to get elected? no, this is not a joke. >> a white guy led voters to believe he was black to win a seat on the houston community college board. >> i had always said it was a long shot, no i didn't expect to win. >> dave wilson is a houston electrician by trade and is described in the texas observer

as a man known locally -- mailers he sent out saying that an openly gay candidate shouldn't be mayor because homosexual behavior leads to extinction. he was running in a predominantly black district. so in an attempt to make himself more palatable for voters in his district. first, there was a fact that his campaign material never showed his face. >> his flyers depicted -- the pictures he admits were just lifted off the internet. >> all of these supporters are african-american. >> what a coincidence. >> then there was this radio ad. >> have you be keeping up with the hccc district two race? >> the one between -- voted

against $6 million in scholarships for our children right here in our neighborhood. girl, please, i bet he has relative who could use some of that scholarship money. >> it's hard to say how much wilson's little show in racial deception helped him in last week's election, but his opponent is black, and wilson managed to eke out a victory by only 26 votes in a race with more than 11,000 cast. one of our chief problems with the way we think and talk about race is accepting its boundaries, so somewhere beneath the downright ugliness dispensed by dave wilson, there's a colonel of truth that the racial lines aren't as hard and fast. take a 62-year-old white supremesist. yesterday cobb agreed to undergo

a dna test on daytime tv. >> craig polk has undergone dna testing to determine genetic ancestry, 86% european, and -- >> just give it to him. >> 14% sub saharan african. >> wait a minute, hold on. >> that's called statistical noise. >> you have a little black in you. >> that right there, what you saw, that's the confounding truth about race. it is two things at once, it is a construction, a fiction,

something completely invented by our society to divide and categorize and oppress people. but no matter how arbitrary that is, race is also at the same time an absolute reality, with very real consequences, it structures the way we move through this world. and no one, at least in my generation has ever quite nailed that paradox of the convention of race as well as this genius, dave shapell. >> now it's time to show these people what black power is all about. identity in case some radical wants to shoot you. >> we want to see your face. >> yeah. >> you want to see my face? people see my face. don't be afraid! i have seen the light. thank you all for coming.

white power. >> so, to dave wilson, you, sir, got yourself elected on a bait and switch. so maybe you can spend your term in office actually trying to faithfully represent the people that voted for you. and for paul cobb, just watch that shapell clip over and over see what you might have been blind to before.

stay tuned, we have a special report on guns in america coming up you don't want to miss. first, i want to share the three most awesomest things on the interent today. here's a mcdonald's mcrib, and here's what the mcdonald's mcrib looks like when it's still frozen. my buddy works at mcdonald's and sent me this photo of raw mcrib meat. and on the left, what the mcrib feels like, on the right, the

sad, horrible truth. the mcrib, no stranger to revultion. >> me, i'm not getting too much of that barbecue taste. but i got to say, it's not that bad. i think it adds to the flavor. i like that little bit of bitterness that you get when you bite into it. and the onions, that makes it even better. >> to this less charitable inspection. >> the actual rib itself, it cuts like some type of spam product or something. i honestly don't know how anyone could put this into their mouths. >> for those who love the mcrib, and i know a few, today must have felt like being exposed. these two ladies are not twins, they're -- all part of canadian photographer goal of

traveling the world and finding 200 sets of look-a-likes and he's halfway there in this mammoth project. quoting, it's not about looking like famous people, the project is about looking like other people. the fact that two persons, totally unrelated to each other, share the same physical appearance is really the essence of the project. >> hey, new york city, as your new mayor, i know many of you are thinking about leaving. connecticut with the same aggressive policies you're about to see in your city may not be first on your mind. but connecticut next year will probably elect a new governor, and when it does, connecticut will the place people want to be in the northeast. >> who is the audience for this

ad? you're talking to a city that's overwhelmingly elected a progressive mayor on a progressive platform by 50 freaking points. it sticks together the two cities that have and have not and have been growing apart. we'll be right back. [ male announcer ] ever since daryl got gain with lift & lock,

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you might have seen the images making the rounds, dozens of armed demonstrators and a handful of texas women. today we got the chance to talk to one of those armed demonstrators and for the first time with one of the moms from the lunch meeting. >> there's a new fight brewing over gun control in texas, this time it's pitting a group of moms over a group of gun rights activists. >> it happened this weekend in suburban dallas, four moms met for lunch at a tex-mex restaurant to plan activities for their local chapter of moms demand action for gun sense in america. it's a national organization created after a lone gunman

murdered 20 children at an elementary school in connecticut a little less than a year ago. these texas moms want fewer guns on the streets. but they were greeted in the parking lot by a whole bunch of them. >> they showed up with firepower, they showed up with it strapped on. >> we talked to one of the moms. >> it was very unsettling, it was very disturbing and at the beginning, they just congregated and just kind of stood afternoon and about 30 minutes into it, that's when they all strapped on their weapons. they strapped on rifles and i can't speak to exactly what kind they were, but it was various types of rifles and every single adult that was out there was armed. >> the armed protest was staged by a gun activist group. they came armed with hunting rifles, ar-15s and ak-47s. dozens of men, women and children turned out to show those gun moms what's what.

all of this is legal in texas where you're allowed to open carry guns. but open carry texas insists that wasn't their goal. this was merely a family friendly photo-op. today we spoke with one of the group's organizers by phone. >> i got word where it was and i was like, hey, let's go peacefully assemble in that area. >> we went to our cars and got out our self-defense tools or whatever you want to call them. so we strapped on and a couple of people wanted to take pictures of us right away. >> the two groups clashed since mothers demand action -- saturday's standoff played out on social media. the moms demand action facebook page showing their perspective

of the armed stake out at the blue mesa grill. by stander photos make this a -- as one dallas news columnist puts it, no matter the camera angle, there's just not a flattering way to see this. >> at no point in time did i go out there when they were there with their guns. i was too afraid to do that. the idea of that was terrifying to me. we noticed that they started marching towards the football stadium and then we took advantage of the fact that they were gone to leave. >> no shots were fired, no laws were broken. the tactics used by open carry groups in texas, brandishing weapons at people who disagree with them politically is inspiring intense backlash. last month there was an open

carry demonstration in dallas's deally plaza. and just yesterday, one open carry group had a run in with texas police. >> here they are at the capitol in a veterans day confrontation with state troopers. >> we're not breaking any laws. >> two were arrested for trespassing. >> turn around. >> the man behind the camera was corrie watkins. >> you guys are kidnappers. >> walkins is running for congress, hoping to unseat republican joe barton because he's not conservative enough and says the second amendment needs to be defended. >> an armed society is a polite society. we were not protesting, they were demonstrating our right to keep and bear arms.

executive director of new yorkers against gun violence. and shannon watts, founder of moms demand action. tell me about moms demand action and the kind of growth you have seen and what the fallout from this incident has been? >> after the sandy hook shooting in december, i was looking for a mother's against drunk -- it was amazing how much it grew so quickly. here we are, just a year later, we have over 100,000 members, we

have a chapter in every single state and we are a powerful force to be reckoned with, and we are attacking this at all levels. what you saw in dallas is really a microchasm of what we face all over the country all the time. it's very rare that we don't have a rally and that we are surrounded by armed, open carry activists. and you know, i would disagree with cory watkins, i don't think an armed society is a polite society, i think it's a dangerous situation. there are 100,000 victims of gun violence every year, and now that moms are involved, we are going to fix this problem in america. >> leah, if you look at the traction on this issue, and i know you worked on this for some time, there was a kind of high water mark in the '90s. with clinton you had assault weapon plans. the democratic candidate was leading with ads just about gun

safety and winning in suburban chicago districts for instance. and some of it dropped off the table. was there a period where it was like hard to raise money, it was hard to get volunteers, it was hard to get speakers at conferences? >> george w. bush had the nra working out of his office when he was selected by the supreme court back in 2000. and a lot of my friends were in d.c. with gun safety groups, and they found it very disspiriting, it was hard to get anything done with a republican president and the republican governor, the movement hadn't really developed the way it probably should have and it was going to emulate mothers against drunk driving. so we went awol, we really did as a movement. if you look at the map in 1981, none of the states had stand your group laws.

today, every single state has a concealed carry law. so the battlegrounds is the state. there's a grass roots movement growing and growing. i think the more energized we become. >> there's two factors here, as someone who's covered the politics of this, there's the horror of the tragedies we have seen, over and over and over. and there's also the fact that, in some ways the people on the other side of this issue have to keep winning things, the more they win, the more extreme they get, because there's nothing else to win, but the most maximalist things. >> the extremism that is burgeons on the right now, it's not just in the tea party, it's certainly been in the gun movement for a long time, the gun rights movement as they call themselves. what's interesting to me is if you look back at the history of the '94 law, the reason that the

clintons succeeded in getting that law passed, broad as it was, was that he managed to put himself on the site of law enforcement, against the extremism of the gun laws. he managed to get cops around him as a symbol of a safe society, order, all these themes that the right and conservatives had appropriated for so long. now these gun rights guys are the symbol of disorder. they are attacking cops. they are going up to the capitol and getting in the face of the state police, that is disorder. and that ought to be a theme that's emphasized. >> sandy hook was this kind of breaking point, the president made a speech, there was a push at the national level, which we haven't seen in years and then it failed. just as if you tried to roll the rock down the hill, it crushed him, okay, we go back to our other issues. >> the legislators that we had the day after sandy hook, were

the same legislators we had the day before. and while we wish this tragedy would have changed their hearts and minds, it clearly didn't. so we're going to have to wait until the midterms and the elections and beyond to get the right congressmen placed to do the right thing. but in the meantime, this is about grassroots, this is about going after municipalities and states and making sure they do the right thing. we have had huge wins in colorado, connecticut, delaware, maryland, new york. we had smaller wins in california and energy new jersey. we were able to block bad legislation in the state of missouri. we are winning this, we are rolling it back. >> i think the biggest difference is more people are dieing from guns because they're more pervasive and the gun lobby has become more extreme. i think most americans are sensible and absolutely horrified by the actions of these thugs in dallas.

there's no other words for them. he doesn't believe that you need to have a rifle with 30 rounds to go hunting. if you need that, you need to practice your target shooting. >> as the democrats come around on the politics for this? >> i think it will be tough for them, chris, because they're already in danger because of obama care and the rollout of the health care website has been a disaster for them. so taking further risks on guns. >> the only thing that will make them do that is pressure from below. that is all this evening, the rachel maddow know starts right now. >> thanks you at home for joining us this hour. $67,000. $67,000 the latest data available from the census bureau that that's the typical net worth for the american household.

the median means that there's an equal number of households that are worth more than that and an equal number of house holds that are worth less than that. the medium net worth for an american household, the median net worth for a member of the house, is that number plus $1 million. almost exactly. those are the numbers if you round to the nearest thousand, these are the act numbers. and the bottom number there, that's where the center for responsive politics, that's the median net worth for this freshman slash of members of congress. it's weird, right? it's almost uncanny, there's almost exactly a $1 million incremement in net worth between the wealth of americans and the wealth of american representatives in congress.